Jean-Pierre Moreau has edited an exceptionally important document, a manuscript account of a French privateering voyage to Brazil, the Antilles, and “Peru” during 1619-20. Although a soldier-adventurer, the anonymous author had significant medical and pharmacological training. His style is descriptive with an eye for detail, objective without being tiresome. Without exaggerating the author’s gifts, one cannot help but think of another French thinker-soldier of exactly those years, Réné Descartes.
Details of the voyage to the Caribbean, such as an encounter with an English ship laden with opium for North Africa, are of interest; readers of HAHR will find of special interest the privateer’s almost fruitless quest for booty in the “Spanish Caribbean.” The editor’s notes and glossary help to trace the boat’s zigzag course through the western Caribbean. Upon arrival in the Lesser Antilles on the brink of starvation, the crew threw itself on the mercy of supposedly ferocious cannibals, the Caribs of Martinique. The author’s ten-month stay in a Carib village, combined with his nonmoralistic approach to hosts he genuinely liked, resulted in an account perhaps not surpassed by even the great Dominican missionaries Raymond Breton and Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre. Unlike the latter writers, the author seldom lets his Christianity blind him to the significance of Carib religious practices. Accounts of Carib crafts and marital practices implicitly challenge stereotypes about Carib “laziness” and “licentious” behavior. The manuscript also includes seventy previously unknown Carib expressions.
Although Moreau certainly deserves great credit for making this manuscript available, his presentation has many flaws. Most distressingly, he rarely evaluates the author’s analysis of Carib culture. One constantly wonders what Breton, Du Tertre, or other contemporary observers of Carib culture said about a particular practice or belief. Moreau’s bibliography is woefully insufficient, ignoring most of the recent anthropological and ethnohistorical work in English. If Moreau had consulted the works of William Arens and Robert Myers inter alia, he might be skeptical of the whole notion of Carib “cannibalism”; if he knew the recent work of Louis Allaire, Moreau might be more cautious about equating Carib and Suazey culture. It will therefore be left to interested readers to evaluate the importance of the manuscript to studies of Island Carib culture. These deficiencies, however, cannot devalue the importance of the document itself.
